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The Endgame for the Adobe Marketing Cloud

A few days ago, Acquia announced that we’re acquiring Mautic Inc., the only open source marketing cloud. Mautic expands Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform, offering customers new opportunities to automate, personalize, and measure the entire customer lifecycle – across every channel, at every stage, and at every interaction.

We’re marching forward to an epic battle of good vs. evil. Right vs. wrong. Closed vs. open. The Marketing Cloud Endgame. Yes, an Avengers reference is forthcoming. If you haven’t seen the Avengers, none of this will make any sense but I’ll try and explain.

Thanos is the most powerful bad guy in the Marvel Universe, fighting literally everyone... the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, and X-Men. For Thanos to achieve his dream of wiping out half the population of the world, he needed to gather up 6 Infinity Stones, powerful stones that grant the holder with superpowers. In Avengers:Infinity War we watched Thanos connect all 6 Infinity Stones and kill half the world’s population, including half the Avengers. Avengers:Endgame is about what happened next. Go watch it.

Like Thanos, Adobe has been busy filling its Marketing Cloud with all the Infinity Stones it needs to take over the universe, or more accurately, take out the entire digital marketing budget of a CMO.

The Purple Marketo Power Stone

The Green Omniture Time Stone

The Blue Day Software Space Stone

The Yellow Neolane Mind Stone (soon to be replaced with the Purple Marketo Power Stone?)

The Orange Magento Soul Stone

The Red Livefyre Reality Stone

Look, I’m not saying Adobe is evil like Thanos. They aren’t. Well, Flash was a little evil. And endless Acrobat update messages were evil too. But make no mistake, Adobe’s collection of Infinity Stones grants them a unique superpower to instantly wipe out marketing budgets. For CMOs, buying the Adobe Marketing Cloud is the new no one got fired for buying IBM. It’s a safe choice. There’s comfort in all of those Infinity Stones gathered together in one Infinity Gauntlet. But let’s be real: the Adobe Marketing Cloud isn’t the right choice for most organizations. Buying Adobe just because they are Adobe is a terrible idea.

Unless your company has requirements that perfectly match Adobe’s vision of a digital experience platform, you are better off with a different approach. The Marketing Cloud:Endgame is that in the end, closed platforms lose and open platforms win. It’s as simple as that.

Acquia is building the only open alternative to Adobe and all the other closed Marketing Clouds. Buying Mautic accelerates our vision, and we’ve got much more to come in the coming months as we’ll unveil more new products.

But the one thing that unifies everything we build is being open.

Open source drives faster innovation at a much lower cost. Thousands of contributors across hundreds of companies work on open source products like Drupal and Mautic. And Mautic is the only open source marketing automation platform. Open source has fundamentally changed the enterprise technology stack, and it will do the same thing for marketing. Acquia can help make this happen faster.

Open platforms integrate all the applications you already own with prebuilt integrations and modern APIs. This is easy to say, but hard to do. Of course vendor like Adobe will claim they can integrate with everything you already have just to check the box in an RFP. But really they aren’t interested in being open: they are interested in selling more Infinity Stones.

Open content lets you access all of your content no matter where it lives and syndicate it to wherever it needs to go. Today content lives in all sorts of silos: multiple content management systems, content marketing apps, marketing automation platforms, databases, files, and more. For example, if you’ve got content in Wordpress you want to repurpose to a headless app or if you want to reuse Drupal content inside of someone else’s Marketing Cloud we can help.

Open data lets you connect all of your data no matter where it lives. Customer data is even more fragmented that content. We believe that you should own your own data and make it easy to get data in (and out) when you need to.

Open platforms win. If you want a closed, expensive, stagnant Marketing Cloud, go take a look at Adobe (sorry, rel=nofollow)

But if you want to partner up with the Avengers. The good guys. The company fighting for your freedom to innovate on your terms, we’d love to talk to you about our Open Digital Experience Platform. Now enhanced with new superpowers from the Mautic Open Marketing Cloud.